Story-March-18-17

DEMOCRATS NEED TO SEND A MESSAGE TO REPUBLICANS…

“We are not going to make it easy for them to pick a Supreme Court justice,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer declared days after President Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, a conservative federal appellate judge, to the high court in January.

Will they? Will Senate Democrats impede the process? Or will they use the only power they have left, a filibuster, to block Gorsuch?

Trumpcare would more radically restructure Medicaid. Indeed, as health care lawyer Timothy Jost puts it in the Health Affairs blog, “the bill is not so much an [Obamacare] repeal bill as it is an attempt to change dramatically the Medicaid program.” First, beginning in 2020, funding for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion would start to dial down. Second, the bill would fundamentally change the way Medicaid is funded. Currently, the federal government provides a set percentage of state Medicaid spending; if Medicaid spending rises, so does the flow of federal dollars to the state, which is how it should be.

Under Trumpcare, by contrast, federal Medicaid spending would be provided on a per capita basis, and so funding will not match growing healthcare needs and spending. Together, these provisions would gradually push participants out of the program. Even though Republicans have made the case that per capita caps might drive state Medicaid “innovation,” as a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine asserts, “the historical experience in the United States suggests per capita caps would simply shrink the program.”

With one hand the GOP law would thus squeeze the poor, while with the other hand it would gently massage the rich.

Why should Americans FEAR foreign enemies when “domestic enemies” threaten their well being … a foreign terrorist is less likely to injure an American than the REAL terrorism of Donald Trump…

To understand the magnitude of Donald Trump’s distorted priorities, we compared Pentagon spending, which Trump wants to increase, with the domestic programs he wants to cut. To help pay for more defense spending, Trump’s budget proposal imposes massive cuts to domestic programs—from foreign aid to research on climate change to safeguards for clean air and water to meals on wheels for the elderly and after-school programs for kids.

A White House Without RulesThe Trump administration’s most troubling conflicts involve the president’s closest advisers, employees the White House argues operate entirely outside the ethics laws.

So many ethics complaints have now been lodged against the Trump administration that it’s getting hard to keep track. The billionaires running Cabinet agencies, the White House advisers accused of self-dealing, and the president’s own failure to divest from his increasingly lucrative business holdings have all drawn so much notice that Americans may be tempted to tune out.

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas suggested Sunday that the push by his fellow Republicans to pass a healthcare reform bill was putting the GOP’s House majority at risk. Don’t “walk the plank and vote for a bill that cannot pass the Senate,” he warned. That warning became more urgent Monday after an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office showed that 24 million people would lose their healthcare insurance over the next decade under the GOP plan. The effects would hit older, low-income people especially hard. A 64-year-old making $26,500, for example, would pay $14,600 in premiums for insurance, versus $1,700 under Obamacare. Vox called it “one of the largest, most significant income redistribution programs the US government has ever considered—from the poor to the wealthy rather than the other way around.”